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The NeoSmart DevNet Initiative

NeoSmart Technologies is pleased to announce the logical next-step in our contributions to the tech community by the establishment of the NeoSmart DevNet project.

NeoSmart DevNet is a new effort on behalf of NST to reach out and lend a helping hand to other software developers by providing a number of tools, libraries, and frameworks that we’ve developed over the last several years to address certain commonly-encountered issues in a generic-yet-customizable manner.

Basically, DevNet is an attempt at getting software developers to spend more time on developing their applications verses worrying about the stuff that they need to get there. Unlike other developer resources on the internet, the goal of DevNet is to provide complete working subsystems and frameworks to developers, almost entirely doing away with the need for supplemental coding and code-monkey work.

For instance, the first of our DevNet projects to be released is a scriptable graphical HTTP/FTP downloader. The NeoSmart Downloader (NST Downloader) is intended to be drop-in solution for anyone looking to add the ability to download and run components from the internet to their software projects. All interfacing with the NST Downloader is done via command-line arguments, making it language-agnostic and dead-simple to use.

Downloader components have become an integral part of most desktop applications. Whether its to download upgrades, plugins, extensions, documentation, or other remotely-located data, most large projects have come across the need for such a module at one point of time or the other. They’re straight-forward in functionality, but a huge pain to write, debug, and test. The bottom-line is, there’s no reason anyone should be writing and re-writing a downloader when that’s not the purpose of their project.

Developers shouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel over and over again, especially not when other free software developers have already written and tested the needed components and tuned them as necessary. Just as end-users have come to expect quality software that gets the job done from their favorite ISVs, developers too should have the comfort of using drop-in subsystems to accomplish their various needs; especially when it comes to such esoteric and straight-forward needs that simply take time and resources to develop and maintain.

Other DevNet projects currently undergoing the last phases of testing include a Regionalization Toolkit intended to make creating, deploying, and implementing regionalizations of .NET projects dead-simple and an Upgrade Framework that features one-liners to easily check for updates to your applications and even automatically download and install any available upgrades.

Still not clear on what the point of all this is? Just think of DevNet as extending the NeoSmart experience to include our beloved developer brethren.